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Improvisations
NOVEMBER 23, 2009 ISSUE

Rice
Pulao
BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

PIERRE MORNET

M
y father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man.
For thirty-nine years, he has had the same
job, cataloguing books for a university library. He
drinks two glasses of water first thing in the
morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes
almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his
teeth. Winging it is not a term that comes to mind
in describing my father. When hes driving to new
places, he does not enjoy getting lost.

In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line,

counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal
(fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water
than required for tea. It is my father who knows how
many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He
has a reputation for andajthe Bengali word for estimateaccurately gauging
quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will.

But there is another rice that my father is more famous for. This is not the white rice,
boiled like pasta and then drained in a colander, that most Bengalis eat for dinner. This
other rice is pulao, a baked, buttery, sophisticated indulgence, Persian in origin, served at
festive occasions. I have often watched him make it. It involves sauting grains of basmati
in butter, along with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves, and cardamom pods. In go
halved cashews and raisins (unlike the oatmeal raisins, these must be golden, not black).
Ginger, pulverized into a paste, is incorporated, along with salt and sugar, nutmeg and
mace, saffron threads if theyre available, ground turmeric if not. A certain amount of
water is added, and the rice simmers until most of the water evaporates. Then it is spread
out in a baking tray. (My father prefers disposable aluminum ones, which he recycled
long before recycling laws were passed.) More water is flicked on top with his fingers, in
the ritual and cryptic manner of Catholic priests. Then the tray, covered with foil, goes
into the oven, until the rice is cooked through and not a single grain sticks to another.

Despite having a superficial knowledge of the ingredients and the technique, I have no
idea how to make my fathers pulao, nor would I ever dare attempt it. The recipe is his
own, and has never been recorded. There has never been an unsuccessful batch, yet no
batch is ever identical to any other. It is a dish that has become an extension of himself,
that he has perfected, and to which he has earned the copyright. A dish that will die with
him when he dies.

In 1968, when I was seven months old, my father made pulao for the first time. We lived
in London, in Finsbury Park, where my parents shared the kitchen, up a steep set of
stairs in the attic of the house, with another Bengali couple. The occasion was my
annaprasan, a rite of passage in which Bengali children are given solid food for the first
time; it is known colloquially as a bhath, which happens to be the Bengali word for
cooked rice. In the oven of a stove no more than twenty inches wide, my father baked
pulao for about thirty-five people. Since then, he has made pulao for the annaprasans of
his friends children, for birthday parties and anniversaries, for bridal and baby showers,
for wedding receptions, and for my sisters Ph.D. party. For a few decades, after we
moved to the United States, his pulao fed crowds of up to four hundred people, at events
organized by Prabasi, a Bengali cultural institution in New England, and he found
himself at institutional venuesschools and churches and community centersworking
with industrial ovens and stoves. This has never unnerved him. He could probably rig up
a system to make pulao out of a hot-dog cart, were someone to ask.

There are times when certain ingredients are missing, when he must use almonds instead
of cashews, when the raisins in a friends cupboard are the wrong color. He makes it
anyway, with exacting standards but a sanguine hand.

When my son and daughter were infants, and we celebrated their annaprasans, we hired a
caterer, but my father made the pulao, preparing it at home in Rhode Island and
transporting it in the trunk of his car to Brooklyn. The occasion, both times, was held at
the Society for Ethical Culture, in Park Slope. In 2002, for my sons first taste of rice, my
father warmed the trays on the premises, in the giant oven in the basement. But by 2005,
when it was my daughters turn, the representative on duty would not permit my father
to use the oven, telling him that he was not a licensed cook. My father transferred the
pulao from his aluminum trays into glass baking dishes, and microwaved, batch by batch,
rice that fed almost a hundred people. When I asked my father to describe that
experience, he expressed no frustration. It was fine, he said. It was a big microwave.
JHUMPA LAHIRI